1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for creating three-dimensional (3D) content for an Oriental painting and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for creating 3D content for an Oriental painting, which convert a two-dimensional (2D) image of the Oriental painting (e.g., a classical black-and-white drawing) into a 3D image based on 3D information included in a black-and-white drawing image and create 3D content suitable for 3D display using the 3D information.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the attention that 3D TV and 3D display devices are attracting recently, there is increased interest in the production of 3D content. Accordingly, if cultural contents may be stereoscopically created by converting Oriental paintings such as classical black-and-white drawings, traditional pictures may be interpreted in a modem fashion, cultural contents may be grafted into media arts, and application to various fields are enabled from the viewpoint of edutainment.
Conventional attempts may include, in terms of media arts, the work of adding animation effects to a Korean classical painting by extracting the parts of the Korean classical painting that are amenable to being animated and editing images using design work, and displaying the painting on an LCD disposed on the picture scrolls of an 8-panel folding screen. This technique, however, does not take a 3D display device into consideration, and the main object thereof is to edit, process, and display input data using computer graphics technology. Accordingly, in order to reproduce the input data using a 3D display, there arise the problems that an expert must perform additional manual work and that additional time and cost are required.
Furthermore, there are the tasks of converting a common 2D image into a 3D image. A method using computer vision technology derives depth information from near and far information and lost points within a 2D image, generate a 3D effect based on the depth information, and reproduce a 3D image on a 3D display.
However, whether to perform conversion and the performance of conversion depend on characteristics of the image because computer vision techniques are applied to common images. The most significant disadvantage is that it is difficult to apply the computer vision technique to a classical black-and-white drawing using three distance perspective representation, the light and shading of Indian ink and empty space because depth information are derived from 1-dot perspective representation (i.e., European perspective representation). That is, the conventional approach to common images is not appropriate for the 3D conversion of a classical black-and-white drawing because the characteristics of only the classical black-and-white drawing do not appear in a common image.